28-year-old rabbi from Ottawa returns $98,000 he found in desk from Craigslist

OTTAWA — Sometimes when you buy a piece of furniture through Craigslist, you get it home only to find that the seller hasn’t cleaned out all the junk inside it.

This story starts that way. Except it wasn’t exactly junk.

Rabbi Noah Muroff and his wife, Esther, bought a desk through the online classifieds: a cherry wood executive desk for their study. It was a good bargain, too: the seller wanted $250 but accepted their offer for $150. It fit perfectly in the minivan, so everything was moving along nicely.

Then they hit a snag. The desk was too big to fit through the door of the study — by a fraction of an inch. That was disappointing, but they went about figuring out how to take it apart and put it back together.

When they took out the file cabinet drawer, they saw a plastic shopping bag behind it. There seemed to be some money inside.

They counted it out, at the dining room table. It added up to $98,000. It didn’t take as much time to count it as you might imagine, since it was all in U.S. $100 bills. The couple lives in New Haven, Connecticut, although Rabbi Muroff grew up in Ottawa.

The situation didn’t require a decision-making process, or even a discussion, Muroff says. He and his wife knew instantly how they were going to handle it.

“We both agreed right away this money had to be returned,” he says.

Muroff, 28, is a Torah teacher at the Yeshiva high school of New Haven. Yeshiva high schools are not famous for paying huge salaries. The couple has four children, the oldest of them six years old. This is a family that pays attention to its budget and watches out for sales when shopping.

But sustenance comes from above, they believe.

“If God wants us to have the $98,000,” Esther said to her husband, “He’ll make sure He gets it to us in some other way. God is not limited.”